


beneath the pale sky

by ashellthatsings



Category: Runaways (Comics), Runaways (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-30
Updated: 2018-01-30
Packaged: 2019-03-11 08:55:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13520862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashellthatsings/pseuds/ashellthatsings
Summary: Gert starts weaving.  Chase is worried.





	beneath the pale sky

Gert had started weaving.  They’d stopped by a Walmart and she’d bought six or seven skeins of yarn for what ended up being about a dollar, so no one could object to her purchase.  The rest of the group hadn’t had any idea what she’d do with the yarn, but Chase at least wasn’t surprised when she appeared in the common room with a homemade loom she’d rigged with nails and some wood she had scrounged from broken trim around the Hostel.  (Although if she’d managed to make the yarn into another dinosaur to have as a pet he wouldn’t have been surprised either.  She could do anything.)

She wasn’t in the common room to hang out with them, at least not with the loom.  The loom, after its first appearance, stayed in Gert’s room, as did the yarn.  After a few days of hanging out together, the teenagers managed to get tired of each other, and decided without speaking to spend time in their individual rooms and making careful trips to the outside world to buy food and other necessities.  Even when they went back to watching movies together, Gert would stay in her room longer than any of the others, longer than even Old Lace, who seemed to get cabin fever faster than any of the humans.  

“She’d been in a prison at Dale and Stacey’s, so I don’t think she wants to be in a prison while she’s free here,” Molly had theorized over lunch one day, which had gotten Gert to smile fondly at both her and Old Lace.  

“Even dinosaurs can understand the need for freedom,” Gert had responded, shaking her spoon at Nico, who had seemed somewhat skeptical of Molly’s theory.  The spoon had glinted in the faint light of their run down kitchen, and Chase felt something change in the air when Gert smirked and that smirk turned his way and changed into a softer smile.  

After a week of Gert being suspiciously absent from everything but their mandatory meetings and movie nights with Molly, he left the couch with Nico and Karo’s flirting and made his way to her room.  He could hear music coming from inside, and then a thump and a muffled swear.  As fear flashed through his chest, he knocked, almost frantically, on her door, which was answered with a tired “yeah?” He swung the door open to see Gert sitting cross legged on the floor, one eyebrow raised, yarn everywhere around her.  

“Hey,” he said, trying to seem nonchalant, but of course Gert didn’t fall for that.  

“What is it, Chase?” she asked as she shoved her glasses further up on her nose carelessly.  “Is everything okay?”

The loom was on the floor with her, he noticed.  And some of the yarn had been carefully woven into it, tied, sewed, whatever, how was he supposed to know-

“I, uh,” he started, ran a hand through his hair, and continued.  “We haven’t seen you in a while, just wanted to make sure you were okay.”

“We?” she asked, and of course she knew it wasn’t all of them, it was him, he’d been worried, he’d noticed the way that she’d curled into herself after they’d ran away, how she’d only opened up to Molly and Old Lace, how good she managed to be at faking it, but how fake the jabs and barbs were when they were half heartedly tossed.  

And when he didn’t answer, she sighed and uncrossed her legs.  “I’m fine, Chase,” she said.  “Just busy.”

He’d seen that look on her face once before, when they were twelve and she’d just started her anxiety medication.  He remembered she’d had a panic attack at school, and had hidden in the library, where he’d found her halfway through lunch.  She was curled up behind the biographies, clutching a book in her hands like a life preserver, breathing hard and staring into nowhere.  When she saw him walking her way, her stare hadn’t changed, just dimmed, like she’d retreated further into herself.

“Busy with weaving?” he asked, and she scoffed quietly, but kept the smile on her face.  

“Yeah, sure.”  

She had had tears streaming down her face that day in the library, and he’d never seen her cry before.  “Gert, lunch is almost over,” he’d said.  “Is everything okay?”  She’d said “yeah, sure,” in the same way.  

He remembered what had helped last time, but in the library he’d had the benefit of ten uninterrupted years of friendship, and now he’d stood her up at a study date and left her behind.  And God, if he could change anything about the past few years, it would be that, leaving her (and the rest of them as well) behind.  

He had sat down beside her, pried a hand from her book, and held it until she stopped shaking, until she managed to tell him what the problem was.  She had a book report the next period, and she couldn’t breathe.  All of which she said in a rushed tone, and of course all in a whisper.  Because she couldn’t let the rest of the people in the library hear her having any weakness.  And the worst part for Chase was, after a moment, when the tears stopped and she managed to calm down, she muttered in a hopeless tone, “the meds were supposed to make this stop.”

“Chase, what are you really doing here?” Gert said, and she blinked away the residual panic from her eyes.  

“You remember that time when Molly broke her arm?” he said, instead of answering.  

She nodded, and looked back at her weaving.  “Yeah, of course.”

Chase sat down on the floor in front of her, leaning back against the doorframe.  “You looked so calm the whole time. Molly freaked out for like an hour after she got the cast on, but you were still so chill the whole time.”

Gert looked at him, tilting her head slightly to the side.  “Doesn’t explain why you’re here.”

“It was fake.  You weren’t really calm.”

She sighed.  “Chase.”  

“What’s wrong, Gert?”

She reached to grab another ball of yarn and shook her head.  “Misogyny is still upsettingly prevalent in society.  So is racism.  And homophobia.  Lots of things are wrong.  And, in case you’ve forgotten, our parents are supervillains.”  

Chase frowned at her.  

“I mean,” she started again, more serious this time, but with panic starting to edge into her voice.  “Your dad hit you, Nico’s mom might be a sociopath, who the hell knows what’s going on with Karolina’s parents, but- but Dale and Stacey were- they’ve always been-  they love us.”

He shut the door and moved the yarn surrounding her so that he could sit beside her and hold her hand like he had that day in the library, but she pulled her hand back and pulled the needle through the yarn on the loom.  

“I’m not twelve and crying about a book report anymore, Chase.  It’s not a panic attack, it’s just-” she shoved her glasses further up on the bridge of her nose.  “We’ve got no assets, no plans, just the hope that maybe we’ll wake up and this whole thing will have been a horrible dream.”  She pulled the needle through the yarn again, then when it pulled too tightly and distorted the rest of the tapestry she sighed angrily and pulled the line of yarn back out.  Her hands were shaking.  It was a panic attack.

God, he wanted to hug her tight and say that everything would be fine-

He couldn’t lie to her.

So instead he sat next to her and watched her hands move over the loom, and handed her the different yarns when she asked.  

 

Karolina wasn’t going to pry, because that’s not cool, but Gert had a ball of yarn trailing from where some of it was tangled around her foot.  And again, didn’t want to pry, but she caught a worried look from Chase aimed at Gert.  

“Gert, you have yarn following you,” Molly said, and Karolina winced at the dead look on Gert’s face as she looked down and picked the yarn up, and put it into her pocket.  

“Thanks, Molls,” Gert said, and Molly turned back to the friendship bracelet she was weaving together.  Chase looked at Karolina, shrugged slightly, and turned his focus back to Gert, but still making sure not to catch her eye, to keep her from noticing that he was watching, that he cared.  

Oh, Chase.  What a dumbass.  Lovable, loyal, dumbass.  

And if Chase couldn’t figure out that he liked Gert, eventually she’d have to step in.  

“So, Gert, I’ve been looking for some new books to read, have any recommendations?”

“Uh, Virginia Woolf is always good,” Gert said, eyes not quite focused on the plate of food she’d been assembling.  “And, uh, _A Room of One’s Own_ is a good start in getting into feminist literature and criticism.”  

Karolina nodded, and thanked her, then turned to look at Chase.  “Do something,” she mouthed at him, and he looked lost for a second, then nodded, and mouthed “later.”

Gert sat on the couch with Molly, and shoved food into her mouth almost robotically, then after a few minutes, when there was nothing left on her plate, she stood up, placed the plate in the sink, and walked back to her room.  The sound of the door shutting got Karolina to hurry towards Chase.  

“Okay, so something’s wrong,” she said. “Something’s really wrong.  The last time I asked her for book recommendations, she talked to me for an hour about the difference between two translations of Les Miserables.”  

Molly’s ears perk up at this, because she’d been there for that conversation.  “Gert’s just tired, I think.  Old Lace has been sleeping a lot.”  

“They’re connected, not the same,” Chase said, almost absentmindedly.  

Karolina frowned at him.  “Something is wrong.”

He nodded, after a second where he struggled to meet her eyes.  “I’m working on it,” he said.

 

Chase walked in her room again after almost three days of something being wrong.  And Gert knew he knew something was wrong.  But something about that change in the way he looked at her, how he looked like he’s sorry for her, just rubbed her the wrong way.  So she started out by snapping at him, not with much more vitriol than before everything had happened with their parents, but with more than she’d had since.  

“What do you want?” she asked, focusing on the pattern she was trying to weave.  

“Just saying hi,” he said, and he smiled at her.  She hated that smile.  In a horrible horrible twist of her stomach, she found herself angry at him for caring, angry at herself for being angry with him.  

“Hi,” she managed, still with a snap in her voice, having to consciously think over and over that it wasn’t his fault that she was stuck in this funk, that it wasn’t her fault that she was stuck.  

“What’s the, uh, pattern?” he asked, and she shrugged, even though she knew what she was trying to make, but it hadn’t worked the three times she’d tried beforehand. She didn’t want to have anyone else expecting something from her.  

He sat down on her bed, and patted the space beside him as if to invite her onto her own bed.   She ignored him, and kept meticulously threading the yarn through the other strings.  

“I don’t mean to be that guy-” he started, and she felt herself roll her eyes without actually meaning to.  She felt as though her spirit was moving out of her body a little bit, like she’d lost control of what she was doing, her body had gone on auto pilot.  She winced a little on the inside when she scoffed at Chase, and said “Well then don’t,” in the most venomous voice she’d used with him in weeks.  

“I’m worried about you,” he said, leaving behind the padding she’d expected him to add to his argument.  And wait- it wasn’t an argument.  She thought he was going to say something about how she was failing the team, or hurting Molly, or-

“I’m fine,” she said still icy, and he frowned at her, but stood up anyways.  Too polite to argue, or maybe he didn’t actually care.  

“Okay, Gert,” he said, and he stood up and sighed.  “If you want to talk about it, I’m here.  I see you, remember.  I’ve always seen you.”

That reminder of the night they’d spent together, the hurried kisses, his hands on her back, holding her closer and stronger than anyone had ever held her before, it hurt the part of her that she could control, the part of her that wanted to hug Chase and tell him everything that she was thinking.  

Instead she clenched her teeth and stared resolutely at her weaving as he walked out of her room, when she realized that she had woven the wrong color into the loom, messing up her project once again.  With absolutely no thought, as if she lost control of her arm for a moment, she threw the loom as hard as she could at the wall, smashing it into three pieces, sending Old Lace and Chase running back to check on her.  

And of course, that was when she came back into control of her body, when the panic subsided and all she was left with was anger at herself.  She buried her head in her hands as Chase knelt beside her and Old Lace stared from the doorway.  

“Oh, Gert,” he said softly, as he took a hand away from her face and held it tightly, pulling her close to him with his other arm.   “It’s okay, baby.  It’s okay.”  There were tears running down her face, but she didn’t remember starting to cry.  The whole rest of her body lost all of the tension it had had, and she let Chase pull her onto his lap and wrap his arms around her shoulders, let herself sob and shake as everything she’d felt over the last three weeks washed over her.  

“It’s too much,” she found herself saying, instead of all of the things she wanted to say, all of the thoughts about her parents, and his parents, his father especially, the rest of the runaways, the friends she’d left behind at school, the friends she’d never had, the people her parents had killed-  

And him.  Of course him.  Him who liked her enough to kiss her like he had, to hold her like he was, the idea that he could love her-

“I don’t know what I’m going to do-” she said through her tears, and she felt, rather than heard, Chase shush her, his chest vibrating in a weird way, but at the same time, a way that she was glad to feel.  

“Gert, honey, we’ll figure it out, it’s okay.  You’re not alone.  You’ve got us.”  He paused for a moment, and then whispered more softly, with more feeling.  “You’ve got me.”

What was she supposed to do?  What was she supposed to say to that?  How should she respond?  How should she tell him that she loves him, and she has no idea about what she’ll do tomorrow, much less in the next month?  

“And hey-” he said, pulling her out of her thoughts.  “I can fix your thing.”

She looked up at him, and frowned.  “What?”

“Your loom thing.  I’ll fix it.”

Of course he would.  Of course he would.   She swiped at her eyes, and saw the furrow between Chase’s eyebrows.  

“You don’t have to-  You can-”  she started, and Chase shook his head.  

“Gert, I’m not here because I have to be.  I’m not here because of whatever reason you think I’m here because your self esteem is bad, okay?  I know that trick.”  

She looked up at him, remembering the bruises she’d seen on his ribs weeks ago, remembering the black eyes he’d blamed on lacrosse injuries.  How she’d known what was happening to him, but when asked, he brushed her off.  How she didn’t know how to tell him that she understood, that she wanted him to be safe more than cool, that she’d think highly of him no matter what his father did to him.

“I knew,” she murmured, and he nodded.  

“I know.”  

“I should have done something-”

He shook his head.  “It’s the past, Gert.  There was nothing you could have done.”

“I should have-”

He kissed her forehead carefully, softly.  “Gert, honey.   Don’t do this to yourself.”

“I should have done something, Chase.  I say I’m fighting for justice but I didn’t even do anything when I knew your dad was hurting you.” She stopped for breath, but only for a moment.  “I still love my parents, even though I’ve seen them murdering someone. I want to hate them, but they’re still my parents, they’ve still been such good parents!  I love them and I hate it!  I’m keeping a dinosaur prisoner!  What the hell is wrong with me?”

And despite her attempts to push him away, he kept her close, even as her words broke down into sobs.  

Gert woke up a few hours later, vaguely remembering holding onto Chase like a lifeline until she fell asleep, and realized that he’d moved her to the bed, and was sleeping beside her, holding just as tight to her as she held him.  

And as she twisted slightly away from him, to find her glasses, his eyes fluttered open, and he pressed a kiss to her forehead. An edge of panic crept up her spine, because she’d never woken up with a boy before, let alone the boy she’d liked- loved- for years.

“You’re okay, Gert,” he mumbled, and snuggled closer to her.  Of course, he was a snuggler.  Of course he was.  Of course he was soft under the shell of anger and pride.

“What time is it?” she asked, and Chase blearily checked his watch.  

“Uh, three something.”  

The door creaked open, and Old Lace walked in, and stared directly at Chase and Gert.

“That’s never not going to be weird,” Chase said, and Gert snorted.

“Go to sleep, Lace.  It’s late,” she said, and Old Lace climbed onto the bed and curled up on Gert’s other side.  “I didn’t mean in the bed, but okay.”

“Your dinosaur is a big dog,” Chase mumbled into her shoulder, and she smiled. “Pretty sure if I do anything wrong she’ll eat me.”

“She won’t eat you.”

He interlaced his fingers with hers.  “Sure, honey,” he said, and his eyes shut again.  

And for the first time since that horrible night, she could let her eyes close, and sleep with only the smallest of worries in the background of her thoughts.  It was one of those points of clarity that come after some panic attacks, where the truth is sitting right in front of you, but you can’t see it until the dust of the panic clears.  She couldn’t push Chase away.  He’d just come back like one of those punching bags that are weighted at the bottom, except she isn’t sure what the weight keeping Chase there is.  But she knows he’ll be there.  No matter what.   Either out of obligation, or, as she was starting to suspect (and hope), out of affection, he’d be there.

When she woke up from a nightmare at six, and felt him shaking beside her,  also in the grips of a nightmare.

“Chase,” she whispered, while shaking his arm slightly.  “Chase wake up.  It’s just a dream.”  

He blinked his eyes open and took a second to realize where he was.  

“Are you alright?” she asked, and he nodded, and flopped to lay flat on his back.  

“I’m fine.   Are you?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

Neither of them were fine, and both of them knew that.  Gert cracked first, and sat up.  “The hostel collapsed.  That was mine.”  

“My dad was-” Chase started, and stopped, but took a moment to sit up.  “It was my dad.”

She took one of his hands in both of hers. “You know how you said you were worried Old Lace would eat you?”

He nodded.  

“If anyone ever tries anything, she’ll eat them.  Okay?  If your dad shows up at all, she’ll eat him.”

He smiled, and squeezed her hand.  

And God, she loved him.

“I’m going to make pancakes.  You want some?” he asked, as he swung his legs off the bed, but before he got up, she kissed him, straight on the lips. She could tell that he was startled, but eventually she felt him kiss her back, hands going to her back to pull her closer. When she pulled back, she pressed her forehead to his.  “Was that a yes?” he asked.

She laughed and kissed him again.  “Yeah.”  

He nodded, and smiled at her, with the same smile he’d had when he’d told the group about her dinosaur, when she’d yelled at Eiffel-

Chase made pancakes with chocolate chips in them, and had handed her a stack of three with a smile, and a heart made of chocolate on the first pancake.  

Later that afternoon, he handed her a new loom, with a smile.

That night, when Chase went to bed, he found a tiny woven heart on his pillow.  

Other tapestries started popping up around the rest of the hostel, and Chase ended up staying mostly in Gert’s room, with her between him and Old Lace.  And every night, when he slept beside her and held her close, no matter the nightmares, no matter the panic attacks, he carried that tiny woven heart in his pajama shirt pocket.  

**Author's Note:**

> Anyways, I'm in Runaways hell. Title from Joanna Newsom, because she's a poet and I'm not.


End file.
